1. Herbarium

PIEnvironment

PIEnvironment consists of a small group of people who have formed an entity,
so that there is a face to Environmental Management at Plant Industry. Our
main progress to date is simply to produce a pamphlet advertising the group,
and have a basic intranet node on the OHS&E website. We have investigated
a few options for recycling contracts, but the current contracts are fixed
for varying time periods and cant be changed quickly. With only a couple
of people able to devote small, single digit percentages of their work time
to the group, PIEnvironment is not exactly going to revolutionise PI in a
hurry, but hopefully the group will grow in people hours over the next few
years and some good work will be done.

The Black Mountain site will be the subject of an environmental audit in
the next month or two. PIEnvironment is currently involved in some background
procedural paper work associated with the audit. Unfortunately with all things
bureaucratic, there is and element of process is more important than
outcome, but it is important to have some processes in place, to ensure
that environmental initiatives have a mandate and continue regardless of personnel
change.

Last Thursday and Friday, I went to a conference at ANU hosted by ANUGreen,
the 3rd National Conference of Sustainable Campuses. Most CSIRO
sites can safely be considered campuses, and the CSIRO Corporate Property
Energy Manager, Michael Terry, could see enough similarities to present a
paper. The whole conference was really inspirational, and hopefully over the
next little while we can implement a few initiatives derived from the conference.

ANUGreen is the universitys organisation equivalent to PIEnvironment.
ANU is much larger than PI, and ANUGreen has been in existence for a few years
now, but they have four full time people working on energy conservation, recycling
programmes and public information campaigns. Just one full-time person at
PI would be amazing. It really does seem essential in this day and age for
an organisation like PI at Black Mountain to have a staff member devoted to
minimising unnecessary resource waste - from purchasing to consumption and
disposal, not to mention the trickiest of all, influencing peoples behaviour.
Shock and horror, it could even be economically viable to have such a person
devoted to reducing utility bills.

One of the things I will be doing as Herbarium Building Manager as much as
a PIEnvironment person, is to test the light levels in a lot of area in the
Herbarium, with a view to removing fluorescent tubes if necessary. Everyone
has a different needs when it comes to light intensity, but there is excessive
light in a number of places. Pulling out a few tubes in key areas should make
it easier on the eyes and reduce unnecessary light wastage. Fluoro tubes arent
cheap either, so the less we need the better. Like all things environmental,
the key to this light audit will be to reduce non-necessary light output,
not for people to be going without their light requirements.

Cheers,

[Lee Halasz]

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Volunteers

On Tuesday September 16 the Centre hosted our annual Volunteers Morning Tea
to thank the Herbarium Volunteers for the time and effort they have put into
their tasks over the year. The 43 volunteers mount more than 20000 specimens
over the course of a year, an extremely valuable contribution as otherwise
these specimens would sit in boxes, inaccessible to any one who may find them
useful. In addition, we currently have one volunteer providing much needed
assistance in loans.

6 volunteers were recognized for their long term commitment to the Volunteer
program. Con Boekel presented awards to Ted and Cynthia Beasley, Gillian Redmond,
Tony Wood and Margaret Mansfield for 5 years service and to Margaret Harding
for 10 years service. Thanks to those staff members who volunteered to provide
what turned out to be a sumptuous feast. The volunteers were extremely appreciative.
I have also had a number of comments from the volunteers expressing how much
they enjoy coming to work in the Herbarium.

[Bronwyn Collins]

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The Map Room, Datums and other Geographic Happenings ..

Jim recently brought to my attention that a map collection including two
map cabinets was being disposed of by CSIRO Atmospheric Research, in the Land
and Water Building (CS Christian Building). I contacted the people without
delay and being so close, secured the lot. It sounds like the collection was
now obsolete to the group due to an altered research focus, and the retirement
(retrenchment?) of a few people. Map cabinets are worth about $1000 each so
for them alone it was a good haul, but we did get some good maps out of it
also. Julie, Kim and I moved the maps, froze them, and decontaminated the
cabinets.

The maps contributed well to filling some gaps in our geological 1:250 000
series. Bob Makinson started the geological 1:250 000 collection a few years
ago by purchasing some maps that were on super special. There is now a whole
cabinet devoted to geological maps, of varying scales. We also scored a few
1:100 000 topographical maps for which we didnt have a copy. I havent
processed the 1:250 000 topographical maps yet, but presumably there will
be some in that set that we didnt have a reference and/or field copy.

With the two new map cabinets, I plan to hang the Australia 1:50 000 topographical
maps over three cabinets, rather than the current two. This should make the
collection more easily accessible.

Also, the cabinets have been shuffled around to open up the room, and there
will be some further shuffling when the remaining free maps are processed.

Everyone may not be aware that we have a good collection of SE NSW 1:25000
maps. They are folded and keep with the field map collection, on one of the
lower shelves. There are very few maps at this scale for any other parts of
the country.

Some of you may be interested in the AusGeo quarterly magazine, put out by
Geoscience Australia. They contain articles about new products, practical
applications of Geographic Information Systems, general articles about mapping
concepts, etc. They live in the magazine rack on Level 3 of the new
herbarium wing, near Anthony Whalens office.

As always, any maps lying around the place that are no longer being used,
or are no longer wanted, please get them to me. They might as well be incorporated
into the map room collection for all to use. The map amnesty is ongoing! Its
probably a good quarantine idea to freeze all maps coming from outside the
herbarium. If you want to leave them in the Prep Room, I will organize the
freezing to be done. As always, yell out if you have any questions or would
like some assistance in the Map Room.

Datums

A revised CPBR field book is in the draft stages. The new fieldbook will
ask for a datum to be associated with the latitude/longitude. A datum is a
model of the earths surface, that a coordinate system can be applied to (we
generally use latitude and longitude as the coordinate system). The same lat/long
reading may refer to a slightly different place on the ground, depending on
which datum you use. The difference between the most common Australia focused
datums is 6-7 seconds, which equates to around 200 m. This obviously represents
a difficulty for someone trying to revisit a GPS identified locality, or even
a lat/long including seconds read from a large scale map, particularly a 1:25
000 map. If you are keen to find out about datums: http://www.ga.gov.au/nmd/geodesy/datums/.

When a GPS is used, and a lat/long is provided to the nearest second, the
datum is important. Most collectors don't record the datum yet, and may not
really be aware of the significance. Labels from some other Australian herbaria
have included a datum for many years, and CANB now wants to apply a datum
to all new collections that have either a GPS recorded locality, or a lat/long
that includes seconds read from map. There are a number of datums that can
be selected on a GPS unit, and it is fairly easy to identify which datum is
currently active.

As mentioned above, if calculating lat/long from large scale maps (1:25 000,
1:50 000, 1:100 000), the map datum should also be recorded for maximum lat/long
utility. The datum used should be clearly stated in the map specifications.
For those people that use grid references, the datum concept still influences
the usefulness of the reading.

Here are the most likely datum candidates: World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84),
Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94), Map Grid of Australia 1994 (MGA94),
Australian Geodetic Datum 1984 (AGD84), Australian Map Grid 1984 (AMG84).
The first three letters are an acronym of the model, and the two numbers refer
to a year of the 1900's that the datum was calculated (continental drift is
minor but significant for some purposes, not ours.....).

Cheers,

[Lee Halasz]

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2. Research Groups

IPNI in Kew

I recently attended IPNI editors meetings held in Kew. For those who
dont know "The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) is a database
of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of all seed plants.
Its goal is to eliminate the need for repeated reference to primary sources
for basic bibliographic information about plant names. The data are freely
available and are gradually being standardized and checked. IPNI will be a
dynamic resource, depending on direct contributions by all members of the
botanical community."

The editors in attendance were Kirsten from APNI held at the Centre, Canberra;
Gandhi from GCI (Gray Card Index held at Harvard University and from Kew:
Rosemary Davies, Katherine Challis, Christine Barker. Others involved in most
or part of the meetings were Eimear Nic Lughudha, Sally Hinchcliffe, Matt
Taylor, Mark Jackson and Alan Paton. Sally and Matt are the IPNI/IT gurus
and along with Greg Whitbread are the ones writing code, getting it do to
the things the editors want and generally making it all happen.

Editorial priorities were discussed as were other initiatives, funding, software
developments and the relaunch of the revamped IPNI.

At the moment data from each of these sites is uploaded to the
IPNI website at regular intervals, but in the future it is hoped that the
data will be live so any changes made to any of these databases will be seen
instantly via IPNI.

We are in the process of working on an interface for all editors and that
is what we talked about, looked at and tried in Kew. Standardising data entry
is a big issue as we have all had various ways of entering data as well as
actually entering different information. APNI is more inclusive while IK,
due to legacy data, is usually the least. Eventually the view of IPNI will
be the view with the most data. We will be working towards removing duplicate
data, missing protologues, standardising authors, publication details, etc,
and even including ferns. We also hope to allow researchers to contribute
data in our quest for cleaner and more accurate data.

Apart from spending lunchtimes in Kew Gardens looking at every glasshouse,
etc, I was able to spend a few days sightseeing in London itself. I managed
to get blisters on my feet and nearly 5 rolls of film but saw quite a lot
of the sights, including: Greenwich, Westminster Abbey, The Natural History
Museum, Wakehurst Place and the Millenium Seed Bank, Kensington Palace, The
Tower of London, Tower Bridge, St Martin-in-the fields, Harrods, Liberty and
Hamleys, just to mention a few! Of course, to see Kew Herbarium itself
was amazing as it seems to be the pinnacle in herbaria. Seeing BM was also
a highlight.

Overall it was a very interesting and rewarding time and I was pleased to
be able to be given opportunity to go.

[Kirsten Cowley]

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Northern New South Wales

Anthony Whalen and Brendan Lepschi spent nine fruitful days in northern New
South Wales and adjacent Queensland searching for taxa in the Logania
albiflora (Loganiaceae) and Choretrum candollei (Santalaceae)
complexes, as part of their respective research projects in those genera.
Areas visited included Gibraltar Range National Park, Girraween National
Park and the Stanthorpe district, where the entire population of the
tiny hamlet of The Summit mobilised in an effort to help us locate our plants.
As Anthony said: "You can have your fancy government databases, GPS
units and 4WD's, but nothing beats local knowledge". Very true.

Other sites visited included Undercliffe Falls near Liston, and the Unumgar
area - this was an unscheduled stop but it yielded the first collection of
an undescribed species of Choretrum from this part of the state (NSW)
since C.T. White collected it in the mid 1930's. Unusual considering
the plant is 2m high and grows along the roadside! Drove east along
the border to Mt Barney National Park, where we spent the hardest day of walking
climbing Mt Barney, finding a dry rainforest population of Logania albiflora.

Turning back west we also visited some state forest areas in the Inglewood
and Yelarbon districts in southern Queensland, the black soil plains around
Croppa Creek and Crooble where we managed to get completely lost, and an interesting
woodland remnant on sandstone at Warialda. Climbed a small peak near Ashford
known as "the Barbs" in search of the narrow leaved, western form
of Logania albiflora, which we found in abundance (4 plants only) amongst
exposed rocky outcrops. Further south, we visited Goonoowigal NR near Inverell
and the abandoned Howell townsite, then travelling south-west to Coonabarabran.
Spent the next day walking around the Warrumbungle Ranges, successfully finding
the same form of Logania albiflora that was present at the Barbs, in
full flower. A bushwalker who had a nagging suspicion he had seen an
Exocarpos in amongst millions of Callitris couldnt believe his
luck when he stumbled across Australia leading authority in Santalaceae pressing
plants in the Warrumbungles car park, who confirmed his hunch. No doubt he
headed off to town that afternoon to buy a lottery ticket!

From here we went south to Gilgandra, for an incredibly easy collection of
Choretrum candollei literally metres from our accomodation (makes
you wonder why it has only been collected once at this site, and 40 years
ago at that), and a frustrating attempt at relocating a population of Logania
albiflora in the Goonoo State Forest south-west of Mendooran. All
we managed to find was a solitary plant about 10cm high, despite considerable
searching - this locality is interesting as it was only discovered by processing
material of the Biddiscombe collection, which had laid unprocessed in the
link backlog for nearly 50 years. And who said backlog collections were
unimportant....

Overall, we had a very successful trip, and we managed to find our plants
at nearly all the sites we visited, resulting in a number of good herbarium
collections, as well as material for DNA extraction. Good numbers
of general herbarium collections were also made, increasing our holdings from
these poorly represented parts of New South Wales and Queensland. Anthony
also got to practice his digital camera skills on plants that are not known
to have photogenic qualities.